woman-preserve-ascii

woman-preserve-ascii is a variable defined in `woman.el'.
Its value is

t

Documentation:
If non-nil, preserve ASCII characters in the WoMan buffer.
Otherwise, to save time, some backslashes and spaces may be
represented differently (as the values of the variables
`woman-escaped-escape-char' and `woman-unpadded-space-char'
respectively) so that the buffer content is strictly wrong even though
it should display correctly. This should be irrelevant unless the
buffer text is searched, copied or saved to a file.

You can customize this variable.